Monday, April 07, 2008

The dust jacket describes Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World's Food System as a book written “in the style of No Logo”, Naomi Klein’s 2000 anticorporate manifesto, and so it is. And this is its strength and its weakness. I've written a brief review here.

What I found most useful about Raj Patel's overview is the clear sense he makes of of the weird hourglass shape the global capitalist food system has taken on, with so much money and power concentrated in the wholesale corporate bottleneck, which leaves the rest of us, the masses of producers and consumers, relegated to the margins. Patel should be congratulated for paying such close attention to the problem of food production, distribution and consumption, and you can keep an eye on his tracking of developments here.

In this month's Vanity Fair, there's an investigation of some of the darker aspects of corporate monopoly control of food production, and the Institute for Food and Development Policy presents an interesting insight into the contradictions between "slow food" and "food sovereignty" here.

There's a hop shortage at the moment as well, so expect beer prices to increase. The guy who runs my local homebrew supply shop was showing me a list of hops from one of his suppliers--around two thirds of the list was unavailable, and he was backordered for the rest. Rice is important and all, but things will get ugly if I can't afford to drink beer anymore.

I spent a large part of the last year researching American firms. Agri-business in particular. The reach & scale of these conglomerates is frightening- as is the fact that power is concentrated in very few hands - many of the largest are closely held empires. You can feel if not see their unstated influence on both Democrats and Republicans. The illegal immigration debate will ultimately be settled on their terms as will the matter of gm foods. There was a time when US trust-busting legislation made those who decried Canada's levels of corporate concentration envious. Not so much now.

Old CAP was for EU taxpayers to subsidise maximum production and so ended up with a "mountain" of over-production. This was dumped at below cost prices on the world market - provided cheap food, but suppressed production by lowering prices paid to farmers in "non-protected" (read 3rd world) markets.

New CAP was forced by pressure on the EU to end the dumping. To do this the EU could have chosen to stop subsidising production costs and let farmers face market realities, but that would be political suicide. What they decided was to continue to subsidise, but cut production volumes.

New CAP is a replacement of production subsidy with an acrerage subsidy, for maintaining the land in a pleasing state. Limiting quotas for farms have been established that mandate a maximumm a farmer can produce.

In effect the current EU policy is to spend about 50bn euro per year with the specific aim of cutting its food production. Ironically as food prices increase (like now) it becomes possible for EU farmers to produce food for the world market at below market costs (no dumping), but they are not able to do so because this would be in violation of their Brussels imposed quota conditions.